Thursday, May 15, 2014

WAKING A SLEEPING GIANT

Simple minded elitist refer to fast food workers as "unskilled" and not deserving of a livable wage. They threaten to replace them with machines should they complain about their working conditions or wages.

The one thing these simpletons forgot to take into account is that these are "human beings" and being treated like machines will eventually provoke them to defend themselves against this kind of abuse.

Thursday’s protests come after the first-ever global meeting of fast-food workers last week, organized by the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF) in New York. Dozens of delegates from labor unions representing 12 million workers in 126 countries joined the U.S. movement of fast-food workers, which, Fells said, “created a huge sense of unity of fast-food workers around the globe.

This is a wake up call to the 1% that there are millions (if not billions) of people who are no longer willing to accept the status quo which has resulted in creating chronic and massive income inequality where a small number of people wallow in wealth while the rest of the world wallows in poverty; leaving very few in the middle.

Pope Francis fired the first shot;

Pope Francis recently called for a "legitimate redistribution" of wealth when meeting with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, saying governments should work to end the "economy of exclusion" that plagues the poor and the middle class from rising up the economic ladder.

"I do not hesitate to state, as did my predecessors, that equitable economic and social progress can only be attained by joining scientific and technical abilities with an unfailing commitment to solidarity accompanied by a generous and disinterested spirit of gratuitousness at every level," Francis said.

"A contribution to this equitable development will also be made both by international activity aimed at the integral human development of all the world's peoples and by the legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the state, as well as indispensable cooperation between the private sector and civil society," the pontiff continued.

The pope, who has often reiterated his desire to see the Catholic Church be "a poor Church [...] for the poor," went on to argue that the only way to overcome poverty is to push forward and progress: "Much more needs to be achieved, since an important part of humanity does not share in the benefits of progress and is in fact relegated to the status of second-class citizens."